Are warriors going to get "stacked" multi-purpose consumables to compensate for the inevitable decrease in inventory size required to maintain balance?

There might be some solutions, I think. Perhaps just have spellboks take up more inventory slots? Alright, that's not quite a serious suggestion, but if spellbooks in general were indestructible from elemental damage and could not be stolen, then they could weigh considerably more (thus significantly affecting inventory until late game). Not that this is necessarily an ideal solution, but I think the inventory issue could be solved.

(Maybe some "warrior-esque" rods should just be combined? Caster types usually don't actually need them that much, so it might not affect their balance too much, so... why not?)

It would be nice if sleep scrolls/staves/spells were guaranteed to work unless specific no_sleep flag is present on monster, and lasted until the monster is awakened by failed stealth roll or some kind of other thing (shriek/damage/whatever). This way sleep things would be super useful for rogues and stealth would actually have a meaning.

They could be made rare/mana-expensive etc but I see this can be potentially good.

I think the infallible sleep idea has promise for monster status - the problem with all those spells is getting the balance right, but currently it's ridiculously tilted in favour of the monsters.

Maybe you could make all status effects infallible, but with a very short minimum duration? So providing you don't fail to cast the spell/zap the wand, any non-immune monster is guaranteed to be confused or scared, but there's a chance it could recover the very next turn. Or possibly the duration could be linked to character level (for spells) or device skill, so that later in the game you're guaranteed a more lasting effect.

It would be nice if sleep scrolls/staves/spells were guaranteed to work unless specific no_sleep flag is present on monster, and lasted until the monster is awakened by failed stealth roll or some kind of other thing (shriek/damage/whatever). This way sleep things would be super useful for rogues and stealth would actually have a meaning.

I certainly use Cure Poison for a while, for example, because I will let myself get too poisoned and then realise it's going to kill me. I have to disagree with Chaos Strike, too - that's the spell of choice against high level uniques.

One of the issues, too, is that the game has changed around a lot of these spells. Trap/Door Destruction, for example, was more useful when there were still jammed doors.

I use cure poison all the time as poison prevents you from running and I run literally everywhere.

Chaos strike is definitely great against uniques since they cannot be polymorphed.

I also use trap/door destruction when the traps are not nicely lined up for my rod of disarming.

I also use create stairs when trying to get deeper quickly.

There are definitely a lot of spells that I never cast after the first time though.

I know I just dropped a list of spells earlier with no solutions or anything. I sort of ran out of time. Anyway, you can probably break the bad spells down into subcategories, such as.

1) Spells that are useless (the current state of status effect spells)
2) Spells that are inefficient (mana cost too high)
3) Spells that are outclassed by an earlier spell (healing spells, chant)

The useless spells can be fixed by making them more useful, the inefficient spells can be improved by reducing the cost, and the outclassed spells can be improved by making the later spells better, or the earlier spells worse (or at very least, dropping the mana cost).

However, there's another point which I've come across after playing a bunch of roguelikes with lots of skills. It's going to be impossible to make all spells useful in every game. It's probably going to be impossible to make all spells useful at all. However, it is possible to make all spells useful for at least one game. You can do this by altering when players get access to spells. Right now, all players immediately have access to the first 4 books. That means to be useful, every spell must compete with all the other spells in those books. What if the subset of spells the player had access to changed with each game. Maybe some games your mage would learn acid bolt before frost bolt, simply because they find the acid bolt spell first.

I think this goes back to the idea that Derakon proposed a long time ago that spells should be found in "spell scrolls" that could then be placed in the players spellbook. Maybe the player starts with a spellbook that can hold 8 spells of level 10 or less. and can buy more "advanced" books from the store, that can hold more advanced spells. Then the player can decide what spells to put in their spell book, and can even erase spells they no longer care for to replace with better spells.

This goes for arcane casters but you could also do the same with holy casters if you want a similar system. If you want a different system, you can remove holy books altogether from priests and paladins. Instead, you can have some game item that the priest can use to "worship" their god and in return the god may grant them a new spell, randomly chosen of course. They have access to all spells given to them by their god at any point in time.

Yes this makes inventory much easier for every spell caster class, but I don't think that should actually be a guiding principle.

What makes angband replayable is that the challenge is different each game and depends on what you find and when you find it. Right now warrior has the most variability between games simply because the spell list is forced and warriors are wholly reliant on the items they find. If we make casters also reliant on the items, I think it greatly improves gameplay.